Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  (CHECK ONE)

  How can an immanent theory of evolution mounted from the transcending posture of science account for the appearance in the Cosmos of a triumphant, godlike, murderous alien, the only alien in the Cosmos, Homo sapiens sapiens, e.g., the scientist himself?

  Which is to say only that Darwin was a very great scientist, that Wallace was a little nutty, sometimes obnoxiously occult, but in the end may have been closer to the truth about man.

  Thought Experiment: You are a high-school student. In school, you attend biology class where you are taught modern evolutionary theory. On Sunday, you go to church, where you hear the story of creation from a fundamentalist preacher. Then you go to college and hear a liberal professor-theologian who teaches a class on Science and the World’s Great Religions. You speak to the professor-theologian about the dispute between the preacher and the biology teacher. The professor-theologian smiles and says: Both are right. Genesis is a mythical account of the origin of the Cosmos, the origin of life and the origin of man. There is a certain truth in this myth. There are other cosmological myths, each valid in its own way. There is such a thing as mythical truth. Indeed, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution through mutations and natural selection is in fact more impressive evidence of God’s majesty than the notion that God created the millions of species by separate and arbitrary acts of creation like a child modeling a menagerie out of clay.

  The student says: None of you is satisfactory. All of you are unconvincing—and you, the professor-theologian, may be the worst of the lot, satisfying nobody and papering over everything in the name of nothing. How can a myth which you say is untrue in the scientific sense be true in another sense? What is the truth? What I want to know is this, and it doesn’t seem to be too much to ask: whatever the time and place of the appearance of man, whether it was the Late Pleistocene, the Upper Paleolithic, whether in the caves of the Dordogne or the Neander River—please tell me, leaving God aside, apart from Darwin and Wallace, please tell me, not in detail, but only in the most general and schematic way—please tell me how it came to pass that matter in interaction, a sequence of energy exchanges, neurones firing other neurones like a binary computer, can result in my being conscious, having a self, being able to utter sentences which are more or less true and which you can understand. Please excuse my stupidity, but would someone draw me a picture? Or just tell me in principle how this could happen. Or, if there is a soul, please tell me what evidence there is that it exists, and if it does, how it is connected with this compact mass of billions of neurones which is my brain.

  How do you think his three elders, the scientist, the preacher, the professor-theologian, each of whom claims knowledge of a certain species of truth, would answer him?

  How would you answer him?

  (a) Stick with current scientific theory. It is more reliable than religion. Indeed, there may not be any such thing as soul, self, consciousness, and the rest.

  (b) God comes first, above all else, therefore above science. Believe in the Bible, and all else follows.

  (c) I don’t know the answer. Why don’t you stop complaining and become an anthropologist, a psycholinguist, or a neurobiologist and try to find out for yourself?

  (CHECK ONE)

  Question (II): The anomaly of objectivism. In view of the proclaimed neutrality of the scientific method toward God and its openness to evidence, how do you account for the objectivist’s dislike of God, even when the possibility of God’s existence is raised by a scientist with the highest credentials?

  The following incident occurred at Harvard University, presumably a citadel of objective knowledge. I quote from an article by Charles Krauthammer (The New Republic, July 25, 1981): “Several years ago the great Australian neurobiologist, Sir John Eccles, ended a Harvard lecture on brain organization by admitting that although evolution could account for the brain, it could not, in his view, account for the mind, with its mysterious capacity for consciousness and thought: only something transcendent could account for that. The audience began hissing.”

  The anomaly lies in the fact that the Harvard audience, presumably endowed with mind, consciousness, and thought, and presumably with more intellectual curiosity than most, might have been expected to welcome the views of a famous neurobiologist on the subject—particularly in view of the failure of academic psychology even to address itself to these matters.

  Why did the Harvard audience hiss Sir John Eccles and not, say, Jane Fonda?

  (a) Because God and religion have a bad name, and deservedly so, what with the excesses of the Moral Majority and the fundamentalist attack on science and, especially, the absurdity of “scientific creationism.”

  (b) Because, while the scientific method may be officially neutral toward God, scientism, an attitude which extrapolates from the objectivity of the scientific method to an all-construing transcending objectivism, cannot be neutral. There is no room in the Cosmos for an absolutely transcending objective mind and an absolutely transcending God.

  (CHECK ONE)

  (16) The Lonely Self:

  Why the Autonomous Self feels so Alone in the Cosmos that it will go to any Length to talk to Chimpanzees, Dolphins, and Humpback Whales

  IN RECENT YEARS a tremendous amount of effort and money has been spent by the government and primatologists in the effort to demonstrate that chimpanzees and other apes can learn human language. Chimps were adopted like children and, unlike children, were subjected to years of concentrated lessons in speech. When attempts to teach chimps to speak failed, sign language was substituted. Glowing successes were reported. Some chimps became famous.

  Yet the most recent assessments by responsible scientists are that the primatologists have either deluded themselves or at least made exaggerated claims. It now appears that chimps are not using language after all but are, rather, using signs and responses in order to obtain rewards (e.g., bananas). The basic elements of language are missing: symbols, sentences, productivity, cultural transmission. Now even some of the most evangelical primatologists have modified their claims.

  In short, it appears that chimps can’t talk, with either their voices or their hands. Or, as Sebeok puts it, animals have communication but not language.

  Yet the public perception is that chimps, and perhaps dolphins and the humpback whale, have crossed the language barrier. There are speculations about the mathematical and metaphysical knowledge of dolphins. For example, according to a recent newspaper account, the song of a humpback whale has ten times as many phonemes as does human speech.

  Question: Why do people in general want to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak, and why do some scientists in particular want so badly to believe that chimps can speak that they will compromise their own science?

  (a) Because anyone who has invested reputation, a great deal of effort, time, and money in an experiment wants it to succeed.

  (b) Because the last three hundred years have seen the dethronement of man from what he believed to be his central position in the Cosmos to an insignificant planet (Copernicus, Galileo), from his uniqueness among the species as the only besouled creature and as created by God in His image (Darwin), and even from the sovereignty of his own consciousness (Freud). Only language and other symbolic behavior (art, music) seems to remain as the sole remaining indisputably unique attribute of man. If language can be shown to be within the capability of apes, dolphins, and humpback whales, the dethronement of man will be complete.

  (c) Because man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself, feeling himself somehow different from other creatures, both superior and inferior—superior because, after all, he studies other animals and writes scientific articles about them, and other animals don’t study him; inferior because he is not a very good animal, is often stupid, irrational, and self-destructive—and solitary in the Cosmos, like Robinson Crusoe marooned on an island populated by goats. Therefore, he would like to discover his place in t
he Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk. So anxious, in fact, have some people been to communicate with Washoe, the most famous chimp, that in the attempt to make signs for Washoe three psychologists have had their fingers bitten off for their pains. Alas for man: rebuffed again.

  (d) Because a primatologist is competing with other primatologists and therefore feels alone even among his colleagues. If he could converse with his chimpanzee, he would have the best of both worlds: (a) beat other scientists, and (b) have someone to talk to.

  If man cannot communicate with other creatures, he is alone with himself. Dr. John Lilly, after claiming all manner of mystical and philosophical knowledge for the dolphin and after spending years trying to communicate with dolphins, changed his profession: to the study of the effect of mind-altering drugs on the individual human consciousness. He jumped from a tank of dolphins into the tank of himself.

  Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are the scientist who has at last succeeded in puncturing the last of man’s inflated claims to uniqueness in the Cosmos. Now man is proved beyond doubt to be an organism among other organisms, a species in continuity with other species, a creature existing in interaction with an immanent Cosmos like all other creatures, like all elements, molecules, gaseous clouds, novas, galaxies.

  Now, having placed man as an object of study in the Cosmos in however an insignificant place, how do you, the scientist, the self which hit upon this theory, how do you propose to reenter this very Cosmos where you have so firmly placed the species to which you belong? Who are you who has explained the Cosmos and how do you fit into the Cosmos you have explained?

  Having proved your hypothesis, what do you do next? (1) Publish a paper in Science? (2) Begin to lobby for the Nobel? (3) Worry about three other scientists who are working on the same project? (4) Get drunk? (5) Go home and quarrel with your wife? (6) Take a girlfriend to a motel and watch Deep Throat on closed-circuit TV?

  If the last is your choice, explain the connection between the triumph of science as a form of transcendence of the world and pornography as one of the few remaining avenues of reentry.

  (17) The Lonely Self (II):

  Why Carl Sagan is so Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

  CARL SAGAN IS RIGHT in ridiculing the absurd pseudosciences now so popular. He is admirable in his defense of science as a reliable and self-correcting method of attaining truth.

  Yet the fact is that nowadays there is no piece of nonsense that will not be believed by some and no guru or radio preacher, however corrupt, who will not attract a following.

  Question: Why are people these days generally indifferent to science and yet willing to believe any absurd claim and any rascal who puts it forward?

  (a) Because there is a need in humans for myth, for symbols, to construe and order a confusing and hostile environment—just as there is a need for food, water, shelter, and sex—and the abstract truths in science do not provide this myth.

  (b) Because, as Chesterton said, when man stops believing in God, he will believe in anything at all.

  (CHECK ONE)

  Sagan is right in saying that despite all the claims of UFO sightings and encounters of a third kind, extraterrestrial creatures, and such, not a single artifact, e.g., a piece of metal, a bit of clothing of a visitor, a piece of tissue, a fingernail, has been recovered.

  Yet Sagan has written whole volumes promoting the probability of the existence of intelligent life on the billions of planets orbiting the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies—this in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Cosmos, let alone intelligent life. Of all the billions of electromagnetic waves from the Cosmos received here on earth, not a single one can be attributed to an ETI.

  Therefore, one might ask Sagan the same question he put to UFOers: Of all the countless bits of data received from outer space, the observations of astronomers, the millions of units recorded by radio telescopes, why has not a single bit of information been received which could not be attributed to the random noise of the Cosmos?

  Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?

  (a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovsky, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spacecraft in Vermont.

  (b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don’t talk, dolphins don’t talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.

  (c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.

  Thought Experiment: You are Sagan and you are monitoring the Cornell University radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, when, after years of reception of random noise, you receive a signal which can only be interpreted as representing the prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 … Communication is established! The source of the transmission must be Alpha Centauri because of the direction and the transmission time: four years. Years pass. A code is agreed upon. But time is running out. You are growing old. What with the difficulties of encoding and decoding and the period of transmission, there is only time for five simple questions. Which questions would you ask, and how would you answer these five questions from Alpha Centauri?

  (1) Are you in continuity with other organisms on P-3, S-G2V (third planet = earth, star G2V = our sun)?

  (2) If not, what is nature of discontinuity?

  (3) Are you in trouble?

  (4) If so, specify.

  (5) What information do you need? (E.g., what can we do for you?)

  (18) The Demoniac Self:

  Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Spirit of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age

  SÖREN KIERKEGAARD MADE a very strange statement. He said that Christianity first brought the erotic spirit into the world. In his arcane style, which often seems designed as much to obfuscate as to enlighten the reader, he wrote: “Sensualism, viewed from the standpoint of Spirit, was first posited by Christianity.” Which is to say, not that sensuality had not existed in the world before in paganism, perhaps in its most perfect expression in Greece, “but not as a spiritual category.” It existed rather as an expression of harmony and unison. “In the Greek consciousness, the sensuous was under the control of the beautiful personality or, more rightly stated, it was not controlled, for it was not an enemy to be subjugated, not a dangerous rebel who should be held in check.” But in the Christian era the sensuous-erotic becomes “a qualified spirituality, that is to say, so qualified that the Spirit excludes it; if I imagine this principle concentrated in a single individual, then I have a concept of the sensuous-erotic genius. This is an idea which the Greeks did not have, which Christianity first brought into the world, even if only in an indirect sense.”

  The highest expression of the sensuous-erotic genius, in Kierkegaard’s view, was Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Mozart is the greatest of classic composers and Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.”

  What is arresting here is Kierkegaard’s view that the Don is to be understood not merely as a roué, a dirty old man reverted to his animal appetites, a sinner, or even as a good pagan, a Greek hedonist, but rather as “the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh.”
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  Nor is the “sensuous-erotic” to be understood in modern biological terms as the sex drive and need-satisfaction, but rather as the sensual “spirit” and therefore, in Kierkegaard’s word, as the “demoniac.”

  It is this “demoniac” spirit of the erotic which is “posited” by Christianity.

  Presumably, Kierkegaard would have no difficulty explaining that national characteristic which has astounded so many foreign visitors to this country: that the United States is at once the most Christian of nations (at least in numbers of churchgoers) and at the same time the most eroticized society in all of history.

  For our purposes, which is a much more modest and dialectically less sophisticated approach to such matters, there are two things of value in Kierkegaard’s notion of the “spirit of the sensuous-erotic,” and I acknowledge the debut fully aware that this particular passage from Kierkegaard was written under one of his pseudonyms and in “the esthetic stage of existence” and hence not necessarily approved by Kierkegaard writing in his “religious stage.”

  One thing of value is his setting aside the “sensuous-erotic” as a category to be examined in its own right, a category which not only is not to be dismissed as simply sinful but which can in fact produce works of the highest genius, in Kierkegaard’s term, “the musical-erotic genius” of Don Giovanni. Thus, we are dispensed from the necessity of uttering the usual denunciations of the present age, familiar from both Christian and non-Christian sources, and adducing the usual statistics about the rise in teenage pregnancies, pornography, sex in the media, child molestation, rape, and so on. And dispensed as well from the usual rhetoric of the “sexual revolution”—the Don would have made an ideal subject of a Playboy interview or Playgirl centerfold (Hugh Hefner in fact might be described as a latter-day, rather washed-out Don; if he were set to music, it would not be by Mozart but by Mantovani)—even to the point of blaming all the woes of the Western world on the repression of sexuality by Christianity. Such denunciations and defenses are remarkable chiefly for their sterility. There is something more than a little dreary about the present standoff between the “sexual revolution” and the Christian counterrevolutionaries. It usually comes down to the Reverend Jerry Falwell confronting Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, on a talk show. Both men do their usual numbers, the viewer takes sides, and that is that.